Is population growth a significant cause of the global environmental crisis?

Should the environmental movement support population reduction programs as solutions to environmental problems?

Since the book was published in September 2011, we’ve been very pleased
by the eagerness of activists around the world to join in that
discussion. Some readers are convinced by our arguments, some are not –
in either case we look forward to continuing discussions while we work
together to build a global movement against ecocide and for
environmental justice. We expected such debates, and will continue to
welcome them.

But we’ve also been targeted by the anti-immigrant groups who use
population-environment arguments to campaign against what they call
“mass immigration” from poor countries to the affluent global North. We weren’t
surprised by this since Too Many People? strongly condemns such policies:

Support for immigration controls strengthens the most
regressive forces in our societies and weakens our ability to deal with
the real causes of environmental problems. … Immigrants are not
pollution. Anti-immigration policies divide the environmental movement
along race, class, and gender lines, at a time when the broadest
possible unity is essential (p. 133).

In most rich countries the anti-immigration lobby is well-organised
and very vocal. We didn’t expect them to accept our criticisms silently.

But we have been surprised by their apparent inability to produce even a semi-rational critique of Too Many People?
So far, we’ve only seen insults – we are “cornucopians” (advocates of
unlimited growth) whose “pseudo-environmental” book is “population-taboo
reinforcing.”

Lacking arguments of their own, anti-immigration groups on three
continents have resorted to publishing and distributing an article they
don’t actually agree with, by an author who rejects what they stand for –
just because it is critical of Too Many People?

Here’s the story so far …

An adventure with populationists

On January 26, 2012, I spoke at Concordia University in Montreal, at a student-organised meeting to introduce Too Many People? In the week before the meeting, several faculty members at Concordia received this email from San Diego, USA, 4000 miles away:

As a longtime environmental scientist and population activist in the
U.S., and descendant of Nova Scotia Tory refugees, let me offer in
thanks for that refuge, a couple of items that may prepare you and your
students for some of the ‘wisdom’ you will hear from Mr. Angus.

First, is a document from the Population Institute of Canada, as far
as I am aware the premier organization up north for instilling sanity
and science into discussions of population issues. It is titled “The
Myth of Overpopulation?!” and is attached.

PIC has also recently achieved some reknown/notoriety for its big
fight (unsuccessful) to prevent AAAS (i.e., its all-American board of
directors) from vetoing an exhibitor booth on population at its upcoming
meeting in Vancouver. An article by D. Schindler et al. describing that
sorry episode should be online in The Social Contract within a week or two.

Second, Veteran British fellow socialist Alan Thornett has published a
highly critical review of Angus’s and Butler’s book. His critique,
followed by a reply from the book’s authors, and commentary by others,
can be found at http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=6308.

Good reading to you!

With regards, Stuart Hurlbert

This self-proclaimed “population activist” was easy to find on the net. Among other things, Stuart Hurlbert is:

The author, in 2011 alone, of nine articles in The Social Contract, which the New York Times
has politely described as “a journal that often criticized immigration
on racial grounds,” and which the human rights activists at Imagine 2050 more bluntly call “a white nationalist quarterly journal”.

Secretary of Californians for Population Stabilization
(CAPS), the largest anti-immigration organisation in that state. It was
founded by Garrett Hardin, author of “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against
Helping the Poor”, and many similar works.

Despite the salutation on his email, Hurlbert doesn’t seem to have
any actual “Concordia colleagues”. At least, there were none among the
people who filled the meeting room and took part in lively discussions
that carried on for almost an hour after the meeting adjourned.

That isn’t to say his views weren’t represented. Shortly before the
meeting started, two people went around the room handing out copies of
the very articles that Hurlbert recommended – “The Myth of
Overpopulation” and Alan Thornett’s review of Too Many People? (more on that later).

One of the distributors was none other than Madeline Weld, a co-author of Hurlbert’s most recent article in The Social Contract.
She was there as president of the Population Institute of Canada (PIC),
the group that Hurlbert called the “premier organization” of its kind
in Canada. She and her colleague had travelled from the Ottawa area,
about 180 kilometres, just to ensure that my “population denial” (their
description) was counteracted.

Weld also attended a meeting for Too Many People? in Ottawa
in November. There she forthrightly condemned “mass immigration” as the
cause of a variety of social and environmental problems, and spoke
positively of China’s one-child policy.

This time she was more circumspect, never mentioning immigration or
any other specific population policy. She described herself as a
feminist – a claim that was undermined by her insistence that women in
the Third World have too many babies because they are ignorant about
birth control. And, as another participant said, her assertion that the
genocide in Rwandawas caused by overbreeding was a classic case of
blaming the victims for a disaster rooted in centuries of imperialist
plunder.

Her associate, who didn’t give his name, was less cautious. Prefacing
his remarks by a declaration that he was “not a racist”, he treated us
to a rant about the problems caused by hundreds of thousands of “them”
coming to Canada, subsidised by “our” taxes.

I don’t know if this was a deliberate “hard cop, soft cop” tactic,
but neither member of the PIC delegation had much impact that I could
see.

Co-opting a critic

By distributing British ecosocialist Alan Thornett’s critical review of Too Many People?,
PIC was participating in an international campaign to use a
disagreement among socialists to discredit our book. As the case of
Hurlbert and Weld shows, at least some of these groups are coordinating
their efforts.

The first group to move on this was Optimum Population Trust, an
influential British group that blames immigration for rising housing
costs, loss of green space and biodiversity, overcrowded trains, traffic
congestion, rising pollution, water shortages, energy shortages,
overfishing, Britain’s failure to reduce carbon emissions and just
about every other social and environmental problem you can think of.

Just 24 hours after Alan Thornett posted his review, OPT reposted it on its website, Population Matters. It may well be the first article by a socialist that Optimum Population Trust has ever published.

Another group that isn’t known for publishing socialist views is
the US-based Population Media Center (PMC). But it does distribute
anti-immigration articles, including, a few weeks ago, an article by Madeline Weld
that denounced Canada’s “misguided policy of mass immigration”, which
“drives population growth and environmental degradation”. PMC included
an introduction that described her essay as “a case study of how and why
global overpopulation is inextricably bound up with mass immigration”.

A week after OPT, Population Media Center also reposted Alan Thornett’s review, adding this introduction:

Please note this review of the population-taboo reinforcing book Too Many People: Population, Immigration and The Environmental Crisis.
Importantly, the scathing review is written by prominent eco-socialist
Alan Thornett, who is reportedly a member of the Executive Bureau of the
Fourth International and a long-time leading member of Socialist
Resistance, the British Section of the Fourth International.

PMC’s very transparent aim was not to explain socialist policies of
any kind, but to separate the good socialists from bad socialists,
implying that good guys like Thornett and the Fourth International agree
with PMC.

The next outfit to claim Thornett’s criticism as their own was
Candobetter, an Australian website that hosts a variety of bloggers,
most of whom seem to believe that overpopulation is the world’s biggest
problem.

One day after PMC alerted them to the existence of Thornett’s negative review, Candobetter posted it under the headline A real Ecosocialist review of that cornucopian book, Too Many People.
In fact, Thornett never called us “cornucopian” – no one who has
actually read the book could make such a charge – but accuracy would
have interfered with drawing a line between a “real Ecosocialist” and
us.

Candobetter’s anonymous editor (he posts as “admin”) continued this divide-and-rule effort in his introduction:

Alan Thornett, an ecosocialist, amazes positively in
this thoughtful review of yet another pseudo-environmental book. Simon
Butler and Ian Angus’s Too Many People predictably attempts to
stifle linking population numbers to ecological survival…. Even more
surprisingly, this article was first published by a British Trotskyist
organization…. The review below, published by Socialist Resistance,
demonstrates sound thinking, in our view, on ecology and on democracy.

After Candobetter gave that advice to ecosocialists, the torch was
picked up by Stuart Hurlbert and Madeline Weld, which is where our story
began.

They have nothing to say

Alan Thornett’s criticisms of Too Many People? are expressed
in strong terms, as are our replies. We have real disagreements on
important issues – stating them firmly helps to establish clarity.

But despite his criticisms, Alan says clearly that he agrees with the book’s central argument:

The authors are right to say that population is not the
root cause of the environmental problems of the planet. It is
capitalism. They are also right to say that stabilizing the population
would not in itself resolve them.

Our disagreement focuses on whether, within that framework,
Third World population programs are appropriate both as environmental
solutions and steps towards empowering women. Alan says yes; we
disagree.

I have been told that Alan’s views on that question are not shared by
most members of Socialist Resistance or the Fourth International, but
that members of those organisations are free to debate these issues
publicly. If so, that’s a welcome change from hiding disagreements
behind closed doors, as many left groups do. Open discussion is always
preferable, even though, as this case shows, reactionaries will try to
use such debates to promote their own ends.

Throughout Too Many People?, Simon and I distinguish between
reactionaries who promote population control and immigration
restrictions to protect the status quo, and sincere green activists who
(mistakenly in our view) believe that environmental problems can be
ended or eased by reducing Third World birth rates. There is no doubt
whatsoever that Alan Thornett is in the second group, and I look forward
to further discussion with him on that basis.

The groups that have published and distributed Alan Thornett’s review
don’t agree with what he wrote or believes. There isn’t one word in his
review that supports the anti-human, anti-immigration policies those
groups promote. As was very clear at the Concordia meeting, they may
distribute an ecosocialist’s article, but their views couldn’t be
farther from ecosocialism.

The very fact that they have resorted to such tactics shows that they view Too Many People?
as a threat. We’ll see if they can produce their own reply to what we
wrote, rather than calling us names and hiding behind articles they
don’t agree with. So far, it seems they have nothing to say.

Her report is interesting mainly for what it reveals about
populationist thinking -- her quotations from others are selective and
often inaccurate.

Not surprisingly, given her silence at the meeting about PIC’s actual
policies, she carefully omits any mention of the help she got from US
anti-immigration zealot Stuart Hurlbert. She is equally silent
about her fellow PIC member’s anti-immigrant rant.

Weld says that she was alerted about the event by “Joe Bish of the
Population Media Center … [who] was was hoping that PIC had human
resources in Montreal to attend the book launch and hand out copies of
the unfavourable book review”. This confirms my judgment that her
attendance was part of a coordinated attempt by anti-immigrant groups to
exploit what Weld calls “the public rift among those who call
themselves ‘ecosocialists’”.

Much of her report is devoted to complaints about the “left-wing
bias” of the speakers and sponsors. My favourite sentence: “It is
probably symptomatic of the politicized population-denial culture of our
progressive universities that sustainability advocates were involved in
hosting the book launch of a population-denying Bolshevik.”

As I wrote above, “they may distribute an ecosocialist’s article, but their views couldn’t be farther from ecosocialism”.

UPDATE #2. Madeline Weld has also published “Into the Bowels of the Denial Camp”, an account of last November’s meeting in Ottawa for Too Many People? You
might expect it to be published in Canada, but for unexplained reasons
it, like the article mentioned above, is published in Australia, in the
February issue of the Sustainable Population Australia newsletter (PDF).

In both articles, she understates the number of attendees by about one-third.